Advantages of having 2 HardDrives...

Hey people. Im wondering whether or not to have 2 harddrives or just one BIG one.

I was just wondering if one of you kind people *twinkles eyes* (LOL!) could explain to me the advantages (and disadvantages if there are any), of having 2 or more harddrives.

I already know of one of them...thats that if one of them screws up, you can boot from the other one and try to fix the other harddrive...right?

Be greatful for any input. thanks

P.S...my rig will be for gaming and storing etc etc so there will be alot of data stored...

 

theres not much difference bettween a big drive and two drives. i would probably just go with what is cheapest. also how much storage are you looking for?

 

Personally im looking for about 200gb or something....but im planning on selling it on ebay when its built, as a gaming rig...and crazy people want like 500gb. lol.

 

500 gigs i would just get 2 250 drives. the 500 are usualy more expensive. you could get 2 smaller drives for less than 1 bigger drive

 

Thanks mate.

 

I would recommend buying the biggest one you can possibly afford. Because if you stuff 2 drives in that cost the same as 1 whats the point? Here are 2 drives one being 400 Gb and the other being 500 Gb. At a price of $100.00 USD and $140.00 USD respectively. Both are great drives.

400 Gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148246

500 Gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148136

 

I'd go for one big drive, because two drives also use double the power, and in the end the amount of money that you "save" from buying two smaller drives is a very small amount, which isn't really worth the hassle.

 

Oh ok ill do that Thanks.

Was just wondering why i hear of people who have multiple drives... thanks.

 

two drives in general is, for me, a redundancy thing. i have one drive partitioned with a small boot section for windows, then a large storage partition, and i ghost the entire hard drive to another physical drive every now and then. it's a good fail-safe.

 

you can run raid with 2 or more drives, if your mobo will allow you. this will give you much faster seek, read and write times as you have twice as much hadrware doing the job than if you only have 1 big hard drive. there is also the downside to this setup, if one of the drives in this kind of array fails you lose all you data. raid 0 (striped)

you could also run another type of array where the same data is writen to both drives so you always have a backup in case of a harddrive failure. raid 1 (mirrored)

wiki has the answers

edit to fix link

 

Oh i see! That would be cool if i could do that raid mirrored thing.....

Ill try that out.

 

Personally i have 4 internal drives and one external. I use them to store different things and always need the extra space. So multiple drives are a must for me becaue one drive (at least one i can afford that is 300GB or so) would just not have enough space. I am a pack rat of sorts and back up a lot of thigs and store them on hard drives just in case.

 

To me the subject is not about NOT having multiple Hard-drives. Its about what would be better at once. The way I feel is that multiple hard-drives are a good thing. But the way I bought my hard-drive(s) is that I bought the biggest one I could get with the best deal. So in my case a 500 Gb seagate drive with Sata 3G and 16mb buffer for $140. Good deal and only used one spot in my harddrive cage area. So I have lots of room to expand.

 

Multiple drives = good, IF you are using large drives.
If you're just using multiple drives because it's cheaper, then you're just being an idiot, IMNHO, because they use double the power *which = more "wear and tear" on the PSU*, take up twice the space, twice the amount of connectors, twice the heat, which might need to be compensated with extra fans or water cooling...
ETC ETC.

 

When I bought my computer it came with a 500gb drive. I added 1 internal 250gb. I've also got 2 external 500gb, 2 external 300gb, and 1 80gb(my backup for "C". Why? I store all my music on one, movies on 3(1 for kids,1 for westerns,1 for all the rest. I've also heard some process's can be faster and easier on your drives when your not making 1 drive do all the work. DvdRebuilder I use 3 drives for. 1 has the VIDEO_TS folder, 1 for working and 1 for output.

 

Yeh the reason ISNT to save money, im not partcularly bothered about the money aspect of it, if i want something ill just have to save and get it lol.

I kind of like the idea of storing different things on different drives....very organised.

Tell me, would it in anyway be faster having the films and other large files and media stored on the drive that does NOT have the OS installed on it?

So if i had an extra drive with all my media on it, then the main drive was pretty much empty (pretty much ).

Would this be faster at all? (stab in the dark)

 

with hdd's being so cheap right now i cant understand why anyone would get one smaller than 250gb tbh but ohers may dissagree.

if you want a fast, simple sollution with money not being a real issue get a 75gb raptor for your c drive as it is (along with its 150gb bigger brother) the fastest desktop hd you can get, get the 150 if you can afford it as it works out less cash per gb. then get a big 500/750gb one with sata 300 interface and 16mb cache for your media/data drive (d).

try this link for a performace guide with some newwer hard drives.

 

I agree with above. I have my C: drive with the OS and the only thing i store on it are programs that run on windows.
The other drives i have are all split up. I have one for movies (external as my DVD player can play from USB hard drives), one for Xbox and PS2 back ups, one for Xbox 360 back ups, one for PC games, then one which i split into two partitions for various stuff, like i save all my EXE setup files for every program i set up. Then every so often i burn them to a CD. That way if i have to re-install Windows i can easily re-install all my programs without searching the internet for weeks.

 

marsey99.

im interested in your method.
Only....i need you to explain a little better please.

Ive heard about SATA, but i dont know what it means really...

And the 75/150gp Raptor is alot faster than the huge SATA one?

Why is this? What speed/spec is it?

I know yur right, i just want to understand lol.

 

Are they the same as SCSI drives? I just checked on ebuyer and they are like 10000 RPM as opposed to the larger storage which are like 7200rpm...